The Lord's Prayer: "Our Father who are in heaven"

Welcome back to the Shepherd's Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith. Lord, thank you so much for today and for your kindness and your provision and for your saints and for this church.

Lord, help us today to glorify you, to sing your praises, to read your word, to pray your word, to hear your word, and then Lord, to leave doing your word. It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Amen.

The Lord's Prayer Begins With Relationship, Not Demands

All right, so we're on the Lord's Prayer. Last week was our sort of introduction to that because of the audio issues, I wasn't able to listen to it, so hopefully I don't recover too much of the ground that was already covered last week, but if so, it was the Lord's providence for it to happen that way.

I want you to imagine standing before a mighty king. If that were happening, would you rush into his presence? Would you rattle off a list of demands or would you first acknowledge his authority, his majesty, and all of his power as you were standing before him?

You see, the way that we approach someone actually speaks volumes about what we believe about them, what we believe about them and how we approach them. Now, Jesus, in teaching his disciples how to pray, does not begin with a petition, he does not begin with a request, he begins with a relationship.

He tells us to pray, our Father who is in heaven, and these words serve as the opening and as the foundational principle and as the very bedrock discipline of what a life of prayer is supposed to be. These words shape our understanding of prayer, they frame it not just as a confession booth or a demand list, but as an intimate conversation with a loving and sovereign Father.

The phrase our Father communicates many things, but in its essence we see that this prayer is an invitation into intimacy because God is our Father. And it's also an invitation into reverence because he is our heavenly Father and we are to honor him per the fifth commandment.

This balance between intimacy and reverence must define our prayer life. If we neglect intimacy with God, then we pray as though we are indifferent. If we ignore reverence, we pray flippantly forgetting his infinitude, his station in our lives.

Both reverence and intimacy must mark the life of Christian prayer. Now, it's here I would ask us to consider what does our prayer life actually communicate? If it were to have words itself, if it were to speak on its own,.

What would it say?

Do we depersonalize God by always going to him and giving him our dear Santa Claus list? Do we trivialize the relationship and speak flippantly to him? Or do our prayers strike that glorious balance between intimacy, nearness, and love, and the honor, respect, and reverence that are due to him?

Again, both are critical. The Westminster Shorter Catechism question 100 summarizes the foundational element of prayer by saying this, the preface of the Lord's Prayer, which is our Father which art in heaven, teaches us to draw near to God with all holy reverence and confidence as children to a father, able and ready to help us, and that we should pray with and for others.

From this, we glean three essential aspects of how we are to approach God. First, we approach God with reverence and confidence. We call him Father, and that is a great privilege because he has given us the ability to call him so.

We don't come to him anymore like orphans. We come to him with the kind of reverence that is befitting of a child. We don't come to him with cowardice, trembling timidity, or fear. We come to him like a child, leaping, laughing, loving him.

As Hebrews 4 .16 states, we come boldly to the throne of grace, knowing that it is both a throne, which is a symbol of unparalleled authority, and a grace, which is a symbol of his mercy, love, and charity.

That's number one. We come to him with reverence, and we come to him with confidence. Number two, we come to him as children to a loving father. When Jesus teaches us that God is Father, it means that we are children, and we must approach him in that way.

Romans 8 .15 declares that through Christ, we have received the spirit of adoption, and that we cry out, and we call him Abba, Father. And Abba, actually, is an Aramaic word meaning daddy. Which means that we leap in his presence, we laugh in his presence, we're overjoyed in his presence, and we have reverence and awe in his presence.

That's number two. Number three, when we pray, we pray with, and we pray for others. The prayer does not begin with my father, the prayer begins with our father, which is a significant feature. Jesus is reminding us that we are not only children in the kingdom of God.

We are part of a larger family, the church that is bound together in Christ, Old Testament and new, Ephesians four, four through six. Even in private prayer, we are to pray with an awareness of the body of Christ, thus beginning with our father, is an immense theological introduction.

It's an invitation to relationship, it's a call to reverence, it's a call to childlike joy, it's a reminder of our communal identity in Christ. All of that is bound up in that simple, yet beautiful little phrase, our father.

I'm gonna stop for a second for questions before we continue. And also, my watch died, so help me with time. We have to nosedive this thing at 9 .30. We have 20 minutes left? Praise the Lord, look at that.

All right, any questions?

All right.

The Meaning of “Our Father Who Is in Heaven”

Next, I wanna dive down a little bit deeper into these words by looking at them, not just in their English translation, but in their original language. The phrase, our father, is an English translation of the Greek words, pater haimon.

Pater meaning father, haimon meaning our, our father. Also in Mark 14 .36, instead of pater, you get the word abba. Both of these phrases invite the people of God to consider our communication with the Almighty, not through the sterile categories of mere king and slave, but through the intimate lens of child and dad.

These terms are meant to engender dependence, authority, and love, and remind us that divine fatherhood entails provision for his children, and discipline when we are wayward, and care that comes to us in all things.

The phrase, who is in heaven, ha-en-tois uranos, affirms God's transcendence. While father conveys eminence, and if you remember what eminence is, eminence is a theological term that means nearness, closeness.

When God is eminent, that means that he is near to us, accessible to us, but who is in heaven is a phrase that signals his transcendence, his bigness, his magnitude, his infinitude, his otherness from us.

So he is both near to us as father, and he is both infinite and far removed from us in heaven. In heaven reminds us of his sovereignty, and it reflects a Jewish understanding of the heavens as the dwelling place of God, Psalm 115 .3.

It reminds us of Isaiah 66 .1, which declares the heavens is my throne, reinforcing the idea that the one that we call father is also the one that we call king, and we must keep these two concepts in balance.

John Calvin contrasts this well. He says father assures us of God's love, and in heaven gives us a lofty idea of his power. Calvin always says everything beautifully, right?

Amen.

Thus, prayer must be a balance between intimacy and reverence, boldness with humility, love, and affections for his lordship. Now, how does the church understand this throughout history? Well, there's been several different approaches to this, but generally speaking, most in the church have understood this the same way.

For instance, first century Jews understood the Old Testament, especially Isaiah 63 .16 and Malachi 2 .10, that the fatherhood of God was not an individual reality, but it was a corporate, collective reality.

They understood that our father meant father of the Jews, father of Israel. They understood it not on an individual basis. When they prayed our father, which they didn't have the prayer that Jesus gave, but when they prayed prayers like that, they thought about our, not mine.

The first century Jews also understood this in covenant reality as well. Jesus' teaching, although radical, was not supplanting the idea of the corporate, collective identity of the our. In fact, Jesus' prayer was radical because he was looking at the first century Jews and he was saying that your our is too small.

Your our is just the Jews. God has envisioned an our which includes the entire world and all of the nations, which is a profound theological reordering from what the Jews understood. The early church fathers picked up on this concept and they realized that the our father was actually central.

It was embedded into the DNA of the church and of prayer in the patristic era. For instance, Cyprian, who was a third century theologian, he said our father binds believers into one family in Christ. Augustine, a fourth and fifth century theologian, expounded upon this twofold meaning of divine adoption and divine majesty, ensuring that Christian prayer maintained both confidence and reverence.

The reformers captured this very clearly. Martin Luther saw the our father as an invitation to boldness. Of course Luther would see it that way. He declared God's tenderly invite is for us to believe that he is our true father and that we are his true children.

Again, John Calvin distinguished our father as the sovereign authority of the in heaven. All of this signals to us that we have sonship through Christ. Jesus alone makes this prayer possible. Think about that.

When Jesus taught his disciples to pray our father, he was looking forward to the day that he would die on the cross because without his death, burial, resurrection and ascension, the our father is meaningless.

Apart from him, sinners remain estranged from God, orphans in their sin and destined to death. But with Jesus, the our father is now true for all who are in union to Christ. His sonship becomes our sonship.

His approach to the father now becomes our approach to the father. Isn't that glorious? That the very same sonship that Jesus experiences, we experience in union with Christ. The very same approach to God that Jesus experienced, we experience now in union with Christ.

All of this teaches us that in Christ, the our father has teeth and it has meaning and it is glorious. Now, all of these things, remembering them especially is far more difficult than we can imagine because we are forgetful people.

We're focusing on two words really, our father, who aren't in heaven. But we live as orphans so often, don't we? We forget who we are. We forget our identity. We forget that we are children. We approach God in a frazzled, frustrated, discombobulated way and we bring him our to do list before even acknowledging relationally who he is.

That's the point of the prayer. Jesus is telling us, I know you're anxious. I know you're frustrated. I know you have a laundry list of things that are afflicting you. But before you go there, don't forget that this is a relationship with God that is given to you by Christ before you start with your demands, before you get on the phone.

What is the, when the FBI is calling someone to talk them down with their demand list,.

What is that called?

Yeah, hostage negotiation. Don't go to God that way. Go to God first, acknowledging who he is and who you are in relation to him. I think that's what Jesus is teaching us here. He is basically saying that not that you have to, every time you pray, say these words like there's some sort of magic formula.

But every time you pray, recognize that your first approach to God is one of child to father, not one of need to giver, not one of customer to merchant. Super important. Much of our prayer life would be healed if we would remember this very thing.

To live as children of God is to walk the razor's edge between two profound realities, the nearness of God as our loving father and his absolute authority as our sovereign Lord. We are invited into intimacy and yet we're commanded to bow in reverence.

We rejoice in his embrace and yet we are to tremble at his decrees. The paradox of love and lordship exists between our father who art in heaven. Now, it's very easy for us to collapse into sentimentalism, to reduce prayer and God to a permissive, indulgent figure who just affirms and blesses us, like the quarter when we put it into the machine.

It used to be a quarter when I was a child. Those were the days. How much is a soda now? There's so many different ways we can miss the beauty of this prayer. Our true sonship demands both filial love and holy fear and the tension between both is important.

Couple things that I want to remind you of that this prayer teaches us. How are we on time?

We got eight minutes.

Oh, wonderful, good. We're good.

Adoption, Discipline, Provision, and Authority in Prayer

This prayer assumes, this prayer presses in, this prayer squeezes out of us, or into us rather, the idea that we are adopted through Jesus Christ. That we were fallen and estranged. We have been received into the family of God through Jesus.

That is why we can cry, Daddy, Abba, Father. We're not outsiders, we're heirs. That's the first thing. Scripture leaves no room for false dichotomies. We are the children of God adopted through Jesus Christ.

That prayer confirms it. He's our Father. Number two, we have rights and responsibilities as children of a divine Father. The first right or responsibility that we have is that we get the discipline of God.

That is not what you would expect when I say rights and privileges, is that you get the discipline of God. But do we not know that Hebrews 12, six through seven says that the Lord disciplines the ones that he loves?

So therefore, if you're not disciplined by God, you're not loved by God. I don't discipline every child. I discipline my children. Though discipline is hard, the discipline stings in the moment. It reminds us that we belong to him.

And it gives us great joy as we go through discipline that we are his. You would say, well, if God really loved me, then he wouldn't allow suffering. Well, it's precisely because he loves you that he's giving you things to refine you.

It's precisely because he loves you that he's not leaving you in your comfort to make you fat and lazy, spiritually speaking. It's precisely because he loves you that he's not treating you like an orphan and giving you all of the benefits of the state.

He's treating you like a son and punishing you and correcting you and chastening you and shaping you into the kind of man, woman, and child that is going to exist for his glory. So he is a good father.

And one of the rights of fatherhood is you are disciplined. The second is that you get a father's provision. I was talking to my son this morning, and I was actually last night, and I said, Xander, as a boy and as a man, you exist to provide for a people.

You don't exist for anything else. The woman gets to do some of the most glorious work in all of the cosmos. You exist as a man, as a boy made out of the dirt to go out into the world and to work and to cultivate and to extract resources out of it so that you can provide for a people.

God as our father models what we as men are supposed to do for our families and that he provides for us. Matthew 26 through 32 says that God feeds the birds. How much more if he feeds the birds will he not feed his children?

Earthly fathers provide, though imperfectly, but our heavenly father knows every hair on our head. He clothes the lilies of the field more gloriously than Solomon. How much more so will he not take care of us, his children?

God is a provider. The our father reminds us that we are adopted, that we will be disciplined, and that we will be provided for by our father. And some will say, but I don't feel like God is providing for me.

God seems distant. He doesn't really care about my daily needs. If he numbers every hair on your sweet head, Matthew 10 30, and if he clothes the lilies, Matthew 6 30, how much more does he care for you?

The struggle is not in God's failure to provide for you, the struggle is in your failure to believe it. The third great privilege is that we get the father's authority. And by the father's authority, obedience is required.

Malachi 1 6 says, if I am a father, then where is my honor? Fatherhood entails authority, and authority entails obedience. A father commands his children, teaches his children, rebukes his children, and leads his children to call God our father, while disregarding his authority is hypocrisy.

True sonship demands obedience. Love and lordship are inseparable. We cannot say that we love God and not do what he says. Jesus even said, if you love me, you will obey me. Obedience to God's commands is indicative that he is our father.

Disobedience to God's commands is demonstrating to the world that we want to be emancipated from our God. And some will say, well, that's not the kind of father that I know. That's not the kind of father that I've been told.

God loves me when I sin. God cares for me when I sin, of course. But Paul even says, should we go on sinning so that grace may abound? Is our relationship with God this quid pro quo sort of situation where I'm the sinner, he's the forgiver, and we're perpetually happy because we get what we want and he gets what he wants?

No.

His fatherhood is supposed to transform us into obedience. The greatest freedom ever is found in slavery to Christ. That's where true freedom is. For instance, a fish finds its freedom when it's in slavery to water.

A train finds its freedom when it's in slavery to the track. A chain finds its freedom when it's on the thing that it's connected to. I don't know why I went down that and I didn't have the end of it.

Yes, we are in freedom, true freedom, only when we are submitted to his commands. That's why Psalm 119 says that there's liberty in his precepts. There's freedom in obeying the Father. We know this is true.

If my children disobey me, they are still my children, but they lose freedom. And the noose will continue to tighten until obedience returns. It's because I love them that I chase in them. And it's because of freedom that they obey.

It is for freedom that Christ has actually set us free. And that freedom is not a freedom to licentiousness. That freedom is not an unrestrained, an unbounded freedom. That freedom is a freedom unto obedience to God.

It's the one thing we can never do without Christ is obey God. Now with Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit and by the decree of God, he has empowered us now to obey and to obey unto freedom because he wants to give us life.

He saved us from our disobedience because that was slavery. And now he gave us a new kind of slavery that leads us to life. Again, there's so much that we could talk about in the Our Father, but what I do wanna press in is that it defines our approach to God.

It reminds us that we are his children. It tells us who has the authority. It tells us what kind of posture that we are supposed to approach the Father with, which is joy and delight, reverence and awe.

It says so much. And it reminds us that we don't go to God with our laundry list first. He does care about us and he will provide for us. And he does ask us to tell him what we need only after we acknowledge who he is and who we are in relationship to him.

Amen?

Amen.

Closing Prayer on the Lord’s Prayer

Let's pray. How about we pray together the Lord's Prayer? Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

We have no.